


New York City, 2015

by drinkbloodlikewine, whiskeyandspite



Series: Mistletoe - Holiday Gifts from wwhiskeyandbloodd [6]
Category: Adam (2009), Charlie Countryman (2013), Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Christmas Fluff, Cuddles, Domesticity, Established Relationship, Kissing, Lots of Cursing, M/M, adoration, cursing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-25
Updated: 2015-12-25
Packaged: 2018-05-08 00:20:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,170
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5476034
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/drinkbloodlikewine/pseuds/drinkbloodlikewine, https://archiveofourown.org/users/whiskeyandspite/pseuds/whiskeyandspite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“Nigel, what are you doing?”</i>
</p><p>
  <i>“Something fucking stupid most likely,” comes the grunt before the man starts moving. Adam sighs, leaning on the banister to watch him.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	New York City, 2015

**Author's Note:**

> Beta'd by our lovely [Noodle](http://noodletheelephant.tumblr.com/)!
> 
> And for all y'all out there missing the Spacedogs boys!

This is a far fucking cry from Christmas in Romania.

Rather than carolers singing through the streets, it's holiday drunks howling off-key instead. Clattering from bar to bar with fur-trimmed hats, they swarm around and past Nigel as he grunts down the sidewalk. No one will leave their shoes by the door for Mos Nicolae to fill with treats because they'd be fucking stolen. No one will dress as bears or goats, in pagan fur and face paint, to be chased by kids with noisemakers.

They’d probably be fucking arrested as soon as the cops saw them.

Instead it’s all window displays and plastic tinsel and assholes carrying too many fucking bags on tourist-stuffed subways. Even the _Târgul de Crăciun_ in Union Square is a bunch of shoddy crap. It's not stuffed with so many fir trees that it looks like a forest. It doesn't offer up wooden idols or masks or fabrics made by real people with their real fucking hands. There's not even any fucking _vin fiert_ \- just overpriced 'artisanal' coffees and bullshit.

Despite knowing that he rarely did anything for Christmas in Bucharest beyond getting shitfaced and giving extra money to the dancers who wore little Santa hats while they worked, Nigel supposes he's nostalgic, in some miserable way. It's not that he wants to be in Romania for Christmas. Fuck Bucharest. It's more that he wants Adam to experience a real fucking Christmas, rather than New York's blackened slush that suffices for snow and stripes of red and green on the Empire State Building.

The fucking enormous tree on his back is a start, at least.

"Out of the fucking way," he snarls, as tourists separate to observe him. The tree-man offered to deliver the tree for him but Nigel decided against it. Now he's wearing it like a fucking backpack, nylon straps across his chest. There's a particularly sharp branch jabbing against his neck.

Fucking tree.

Fucking Christmas.

"Fucking Adam," he calls out from the bottom of the steps to their apartment. "Get the fucking door!"

There is a sound of shifting within and Adam opens the door, looking down the staircase at the strangely-shaped person swearing in Nigel’s voice. He frowns but he doesn’t go back into the apartment to close the door again.

“Nigel, what are you doing?”

“Something fucking stupid most likely,” comes the grunt before the man starts moving. Adam sighs, leaning on the banister to watch him.

“If you know it’s stupid, why are you doing it?” Adam asks him. Nigel just snorts and shifts the tree against his shoulders a little higher. He’s sweating something fierce and he would kill for a fucking cigarette but there’s only a few steps left and then Adam at the door and -

“Because I love you,” Nigel replies. Adam just smiles and ducks his face against his arm, pushing up on his toes for a moment before settling again. He gets out of the way of the doorway entirely when Nigel gets closer, and then follows him into the apartment.

“Where did you get it?”

“Central fucking Park, where do you think?” Nigel snorts. He lets the statement linger just long enough that Adam - wide-eyed - parts his lips in protest, and then Nigel shakes his head. “No, I’m fucking with you. I got it at the fucking corner, from the tree-man.”

“The tree-man.”

“The man who sells trees, what else do you call him?”

“There’s a man who sells trees?”

“On the corner, Adam, on the - not this corner,” Nigel says pointing, vaguely, in the direction of the end of the street. "The one a few blocks - nevermind. I saw them thought it would be nice to have, you know. A tree. It will make the house smell nice."

Adam listens, attentive, and nods once when Nigel finally quiets. "Where should we put it?"

"Somewhere off my fucking back, angel. Pick a spot."

Adam considers, looking around their apartment. There is a lot of room to set it, different places, where it will look good in certain lights, shed on the carpet instead of the wooden floor, be in their bedroom or the living room where anyone coming over can see it.

No one ever comes over.

But the bedroom has carpet.

“By the window,” Adam tells him, shuffling past to move anything potentially in the way out of the way. “We can see it from every part of the house, then, and it won’t shed on the carpet where it - Nigel, how will it stand up?”

“On its fucking trunk, darling, how else?”

“It won’t balance very well, did you get a stand from the tree-man?”

Nigel grunts as Adam works loose the straps - intended to tie a tree to the hood of a car - from where they cut against Nigel's chest. The tree tilts back when the first is loosened and nearly takes Nigel with it. The second one requires him - wincing from being able to properly fucking breathe again - to turn and catch the fucking thing before it crashes through the window.

"What were you saying?"

"A stand," Adam repeats. "From the tree-man."

"Was he supposed to give me a stand?"

"Probably, since they need a stand to -" Adam stops, blinks, and shrugs. "They need a stand to stand."

Nigel narrows his eyes, suspicious for a moment that this time Adam's putting him on, but it makes sense. The fucking thing leans. He wonders if perhaps in his insistence - that he could carry the tree himself if it were just fucking strapped to him - he made the tree-man forget.

"I'm going to go back," Nigel says. "Hold this."

“I -” Adam has time to catch the tree with a quick ‘oof’ before Nigel is out of the apartment again, rolling his shoulders and pulling out a cigarette to light up as soon as the door closes. With a sigh, Adam cranes his neck back to look out the window, waiting until Nigel passes on the street below before turning back.

The tree is actually lovely, fluffy and aromatic. Adam absently pets it as he stands holding it up, letting his fingers run over the prickly little spines. It’s a young tree, a little one, considering how big they can grow. Adam tries to remember the last time they had a tree in the house for Christmas. He knows people do, he sees it on television, he has seen it passing first floor apartments with their windows not curtained shut. He knows it’s a tradition and that families spend hours decorating it together.

He and his dad must have, he supposes, when he was little. But he never believed in Santa Claus, he never believed in the baby Jesus, so the holiday never held much weight for him. Adam always had better things to do.

But with Nigel, he doesn’t know. He knows Nigel doesn’t believe in God or Santa, but maybe in Romania the holiday meant something more. He will have to read about it. He’s become negligent with his research again, relying on reading NIgel to take his cues. He knows it would mean a lot to Nigel if he read up on his traditions and pastimes, he should have done it before. Adam frowns and seeks behind himself on the bookshelf.

This one only has books about theoretical mathematics and quantum physics. The books about people and places are on the shelf a little further down the wall, and he can’t reach it. Adam regards the tree and considers how far he would have to drag it to reach the books he needs. In theory he could do it, what would stop him? But it would require a lot of balancing and adjusting, angles and calculations to keep the tree in place while he got what he wanted and returned to hold it again. 

Adam is just processing the quickest way to the bookcase and back - figuring in seconds to find the title he needs and to pull it free without disturbing the other books on the shelf from their position - when Nigel bursts in again, tossing the butt of another cigarette over the banister and down the stairs, triumphantly holding a stand for their tree.

"Fucker told me I had to pay for it. I reminded him how much I saved him in fucking gas having to deliver it," snorts Nigel. Maybe the tree-man just didn't want to argue with a man who'd just hauled home a tree on his back, skin still itchy where he'd been stuck through with pine needles, but a victory's a fucking victory and Nigel is goddamn triumphant right now. He regards the wide plastic disk and the little screws inside, squinting as he brings it beside the windows that overlook his smoking balcony.

"Can you lift it?" Nigel says.

Adam blinks, and shakes his head.

"Can you fucking try, angel?"

Another shake of Adam's head and Nigel sighs, clamping the stand in place with his foot as he rights himself.

"Give it here," he mutters, grasping the tree by it's trunk and grimacing as he's stuck through again with pinpricks. "Little sparrow," he adds, chastening but fond. He hoists the tree and Adam crouches, to watch its trunk set in place.

"Left. No, your left. A few centimeters more. Nigel, that was at least an inch."

"Will you just fucking grab it and put it in?"

“Like a penis?”

“Like a - fucking what?”

“Penis,” Adam repeats, clearly, looking up through the branches at the man holding the tree. “You used to tell me the same thing when we were in bed and I was teasing too much.”

“I -” Nigel snorts, brings a hand to his face to press his grin away and shakes his head. “Un-fucking-believable,” he laughs, looking at Adam again, finding him smiling warmly back up at him. A joke. Another joke. He’s getting better and better at making them, at his comedic timing, at the dryness needed to deliver them.

“Yes,” Nigel finally tells him, and Adam grins wider, ducking his head to work the trunk where it needs to be, turning the screws to hold it upright. He taps Nigel’s leg when he’s done and sits back on his butt, hands out behind himself to regard the tree as Nigel lets it go and whoops triumphantly when it stands on its own. He bends over Adam, ignoring the spasms in his back that bourbon with a splash of eggnog will shortly cure, and kisses his hair.

"A Christmas fucking miracle," he murmurs, until Adam's fluffy curls tickle his nose and he stands straight again, proudly regarding the tree in front of them. Sure, it's lost some needles in being carried through the East Village. Sure, there's a branch that's busted and dangling the wrong way. But it's their tree, captured and brought home, and the rich wintery scent of it makes Nigel's blood hum.

Adam leans against his leg, nuzzling softly before resting his cheek there. "Where are the lights?"

Nigel draws a breath. He opens his mouth. And then he closes it again, and exhales very slowly through his nose. "I don't know, baby, where do you keep them?"

"Light bulbs are in the hallway closet, but we need -"

"Your fairy lights, darling, where do you keep your fairy lights."

“I don’t have any.”

“You don’t have any?”

Adam shakes his head, leaning against Nigel’s leg still. “I don’t remember the last time we had a tree and if we have anything left over it will be in storage and that’s on the other side of town.”

Nigel watches him a moment more, lips pursing in thought, and Adam can tell the moment he comes to a conclusion, the moment the light bulb clicks on.

“Nigel.”

“Wait here, darling, I’ll be back.”

“Nigel, we don’t need any -”

“Of course we fucking do, darling, it’s Christmas!”

Nigel marches from the apartment again, and Adam scampers up to look out the window and watch him go, determined in his stride as he takes a right this time instead of a left, and vanishes from view in a plume of smoke. Adam counts off five more strides, in tempo with the pace Nigel took, and then he hurries to the bookshelf.

Nigel nearly bowls over a man walking his dog, raising his hands up with a grunt of apology past his cigarette. Fucking New York. Fucking Christmas. The snow that fell two days before - and at the time, even Nigel would admit, looked fucking romantic - has now melted and refrozen two nights over. It's nothing of the white powder that made the city quiet, gathering along window ledges and stoops. It's a slushy, slick mess of discolored filth, and it's getting Nigel's feet wet.

He ducks past a herd of children swarming around their parents and sloshing through the muck, and into the pharmacy-meets-grocery-meets-shit-for-your-home store, squinting at the brightness of the lights overhead. It's easy enough to find what he's after, considering there's a whole aisle outfitted in green and red.

He recalls, distantly, cursing as a child when he sat to untangle strings of fairy lights from a dusty box kept in the attic, laying them in big loops around the little flat where they lived. Cheap Soviet-made ornaments - probably painted with lead, Nigel snorts - hung beside delicate baubles that his mother cradled carefully as she hung them on the tree. He'd stuff himself to bursting on _sarmale_ and _carnati_ , always conveniently too full to have any _piftie_. She'd always let Nigel have a few cookies later anyway, while the adults drank vodka and Nigel laid sleepy by the tree, listening to the carolers outside.

Never again will Adam not have a fucking nice Christmas tree. Not while Nigel has anything to do with it. He doesn't care, of course, why would he? He's doing this for Adam, he tells himself, buying up five boxes of lights and several more of candy canes and multicolored ornaments. Arms laden, he stops as he exits the aisle, and takes a single step back. He stretches his fingertips to take a plastic sprig of green, with curvy, pointy leaves and bright red berries.

"Fucking mistletoe," he grins, before hauling everything to the wide-eyed boy at the counter.

The kid rings it up, turns the little screen to show Nigel the total and he curses softly, digging into his pocket for his wallet and the wrinkled bills inside it. He tries to avoid paying with his card as much as he can, he uses terminals all over the city to get cash out enough to last him several weeks.

Paranoia dies hard, but what can you fucking do?

Everything is shoved into little white bags with smiley faces on them and Nigel heads back. He resists another cigarette only because he would have to stop in the middle of the street and dig around for the pack. He can have one at home on the balcony when Adam’s decorating the tree. Nigel used to spend hours decorating it as a child, he loved to make sure the ornaments were placed just right, and looked good so his mother would hug him tight and tell him she was proud of how pretty he had made it.

Nigel tromps up the stairs, deliberately stomping to get the snow from his shoes as he nears the apartment. He shoulders the door open, elbow on the handle to push it down, and grins at Adam when he finds him sitting sprawled on the floor where he had left him.

“Lights!” Nigel declares, holding up the stuffed bags.

“ _Crăciun fericit_!” Adam replies, cheeks pink as he tries to work his tongue around the foreign words.

The bags hang heavy again at Nigel's sides. He draws just enough breath to laugh it out again, expression wavering between a frown and a smile, the former to mask the latter. He hardly ever hears Romanian anymore, and when he does it's usually from himself. And Nigel's not heard those particular words in years and years and years.

He's reasonably sure the last time he said them himself was followed by a smack against a stripper's ass.

It didn't make him feel like this.

And the tension that built like slow-crushing pressure against his ribs, thinking so much of his mother and what this holiday used to be, finally eases.

"Where did you -"

"A book," Adam says, and when he smiles a little, Nigel grins. "I tried to pronounce it following the guide -"

"Angel."

"- but that isn't the same as hearing it said so -"

"Darling."

"- I'm sure it's not completely correct but -"

"Sparrow," Nigel murmurs. "Shut up and say it again."

Adam bites his lip and sits up a little straighter. “ _Crăciun fericit_ ,” he says again, sounding just that tiny bit more confident in his pronunciation. Nigel’s smile is enough for him to feel like he’s doing a good job, and Adam says it again, smiling wider.

Nigel steps closer and lets the bags drop to the floor. He sinks to his knees before Adam and takes his face into his hands to kiss him deep. When he pulls back he purrs warm words against him, words he hasn’t said to anyone in a long time. He calls Adam beautiful, he calls him his sparrow, he calls him his favourite man. He purrs Romanian against Adam and feels his own chest swell with the love he feels for him.

It’s been too fucking long, and Nigel should be too fucking old for this, but something about doing this with Adam, for him, and having him - secular and cynical as he is - take all of this into stride is enough to have Nigel become a silly kid again.

Maybe he’ll even try to make _piftie_ just to see the look on Adam’s face.

Keeping one hand pressed to Adam’s cheek, stealing swift kisses every few breaths, Nigel reaches back to fumble in the bags. He pricks his finger on sharp plastic and takes out the sprig of greenery he found, grinning.

“I found something special for us, angel. Better than the tree or the lights or any of it. Look.” Nigel holds the plastic plant aloft and laughs, low and rumbling like a big cat’s purr against Adam’s lips before he sinks into another kiss. “Mistletoe.”

It’s holly.

Adam knows it’s holly, he knows its Latin name and how similar it is to mistletoe, which is why so many people confuse the two. He knows that, and he knows just how proud Nigel is for having found it, for having carried the tree home, brought home lights, made Christmas happen for the two of them. Adam knows that. And that means so much more than a silly mistake made with silly obscure plastic plants.

It doesn’t matter.

He will kiss Nigel under their special Christmas holly and not say a word about it. Because all that matters is that he gets to kiss him, again and again, and have Nigel kiss him back.


End file.
